Look Back in Perpexity

Photo of Hanif Kureishi: Brett Weinstein

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was one of the greatest plays ever written about class and it developed directly out of the particularities of language that defined British society in a way that was notorious and sometimes clichéd. The genius of the play is not only to create a character like the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle but to embellish the contrast by making her Pygmalion not only upper crust, but a student of language itself. Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady set it all to music. Language is of course what plays are made of, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were inhabitants of London who found a deeper explanation for class division. Das Kapital was Marx’s analysis of the workings of the capitalist economy. Later on Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist who was a member of both the German parliament and the House of Lords, would offer an post-Marxist understanding of society in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. And the legacy of colonialism evidenced in a movie like Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, might better speak to class division than the facile linguistic dichotomies put forth by Shaw at the turn of the last century. But here comes Fiona Devine, a sociologist from Manchester University hired by the BBC to create The Great British Class Survey. According to the Times (“Multiplying the Old Divisions of Class in Britain,” NYT 4/3/13), the results of the survey responded to by 161,000 people were that “in today’s complicated world, there are now seven different social classes…These range from the ‘elite’ at the top, distinguished by money, connections and rarefied cultural interests, to the ‘precariat’ at the bottom, characterized by lack of money, lack of connections and unrarefied cultural interests.” The in- between categories that the study describes as quoted by the Times include “the ‘technical middle class,’ a group that has a lot of money but few superior social connections,” “’the emergent service workers,’ a young urban group that has li little money but a high amount of social and cultural capital” and “the ‘new affluent workers,’ who score high on social and cultural activity, but have only a middling amount of money.” Sounds like it’s no longer the mythological character of Pygmalion, but Pandora or Proteus, that the up and coming generation of British playwrights will turn to when they try to deal with the changing complexion of English Society at the Royal Court.

A Touch of Class

Hell’s Kitchen was famous for the Westies. Ray Ashley’s Little Fugitive (1953) depicted the mind of a child as a dangerous place. Then there’s the Russian Sector of Vienna in The Third Man, Little Rock, Arkansas in the ‘50s, The Brambles in Central Park, Bed-Stuy, South Central L.A., Sheriff’s Street in Dublin, the banlieus of Paris with their notorious public housing projects full of angry, unemployed youth from former French colonies, Northern Ireland at the height of its conflict, The Sudan, Chechnya, Rwanda, the South Side of Chicago, the favelas of Rio, and the East End of London before artists took it over. These are all famous dangerous places, where awful things occurred if you were too rich or too poor, too black or not black enough, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s still not a good idea to be a Turk in certain parts of Germany. Iran is not a good neighborhood for Jews, nor is Jerusalem a particularly good neighborhood for most Palestinians. There was a story about a white woman walking into a predominantly black area of Boston in the ‘60s and being set on fire, and the gay man chased to his death by a homophobic gang in a Brooklyn backwater. And then there's the Klan, with its Grand Wizards, who were once ubiquitous in neighborhoods throughout the Old South. There is still something ominous about downtown Jackson, Mississippi, despite its museum and its veneer of culture. There are also the defunct manufacturing hubs that drove the industrial giant that is no more. Downtown Detroit is one of those.

   

It used to be that certain socialist societies, especially in Nordic countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway, produced such a high level of enlightenment and equality that there were no bad neighborhoods to be found, until the oppressed of the world took refuge in these utopias and created a burgeoning underclass whose resentments created their own backlash. Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July (l940) turns a working class neighborhood into a wonderfully bad neighborhood for some titans of industry who set out to reclaim what they think is stolen merchandise. Class and class culture—see Ralf Dahrendorf’s Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959)—ultimately are the qualifying factors in trying to determine whether one is on the verge of entering a bad neighborhood or whether what is bad for you is good for me. Xenophobia is a common means of social cohesion. There is honor amongst thieves and, for the dissolute, Babylon is a bastion of safety. But there are certain places where it is almost guaranteed that your ass will be whipped if you try to save souls.